Jean-Paul Sartre

From Philosopedia

- Sartre with Simone de Beauvoir

Sartre, Jean-Paul (21 June 1905 - 15 April 1980)

A French existentialist, a philosopher greatly influenced by Heidegger, and a 1964 Nobel Prize winner (he declined the honor), Sartre once wrote,

• Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.

His mother was a Schweitzer from Alsace, and the 5’ 4” Sartre was first cousin to Albert Schweitzer. The two dominant personalities, both of whom had been reared as Lutherans, were almost polar opposites in their philosophic outlooks.

Sartre’s 1938 novel, Nausea, describes the hero’s discovery of the meaningless contingency of all existents, human and nonhuman. His Being and Nothingness in 1943 became the central work of humanistic existentialism. It described the plight of the individual in a God-less world without objective meaning, one in which humans had to make their own values. No Exit in 1944 contains the line,

• So that’s what Hell is. I’d never have believed it. . . . Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron, [when it comes to] hell, it’s other people!

Typical of his atheistic humanism are these statements:

• The doctrine I am presenting is the very opposite of quietism, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further and adds that Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than his life. . . . Man is anguish. He lives forlornly in a world without God. He has nothing to cling to within himself, nor without. . . . Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair. It declares that even if God did exist that would change nothing. Not that we believe God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the point. In this sense Existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action. Man cannot start making excuses for himself. There is no determinism. Man is free. The coward makes himself cowardly. The hero makes himself heroic. What counts is total involvement.

In his Existentialism as a Humanism (1946), Sartre rejected theism because, according to Paul Edwards in God and the Philosophers,

• It is incompatible with free will in the somewhat peculiar sense in which he takes it to be a basic fact about human beings. If there were a God, he would create human beings with a “nature” or “essence,” and this is incompatible with Sartre’s view that in man existence precedes essence. This seems to mean that human beings do not have an essence until they have chosen their initial “fundamental projects,” Sartre’s term for character traits. Sartre maintains that at the age of five or six a child makes his first fundamental choice which gives him his early character. This choice can at any time be undone so that the person acquires a different character or essence. The initial fundamental choice was not even in principle predictable. Even God, if there were a God, could not have known it in advance.

Sartre’s entire body of works made the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1948.

Life (6 November 1964) quoted his saying,

• We have lost religion, but we have gained humanism.

In 1966–1967, although he and Bertrand Russell differed on philosophic questions, Sartre joined the International War Crimes Tribunal which found the United States guilty of genocide during the war with North Vietnam.

Upon Sartre’s death, no public ceremonies were planned, but an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 people came spontaneously to pay tribute at his funeral. In Moscow, Izvestia noted the death with only five lines. Sartre is one of the many celebrities buried at Montparnasse (for example, André Citroën, Guy de Maupassant, the Iowan actress Jean Seberg, Pierre Laval, Alfred Dreyfus).

The following year, Simone de Beauvoir published Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), in which she told of his last months, his being incontinent, his young companions, and his stashing of whisky bottles, rather than his interest in evaluating his political legacy. Some of what she failed to include, Bianca Lamblin added in A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Bianca Lamblin (1996). Lamblin, a redheaded Polish-born Jew who had come to France with her parents as a baby in 1922, had become hopelessly infatuated with Beauvoir, her high school teacher with whom she had sex. She then had sex after Beauvoir introduced her to Sartre, then thirty-three, who also became her teacher at the Sorbonne. In 1940, when Lamblin was dropped by Sartre, then by Beauvoir, she was infuriated and the following year married Bernard Lamblin, a fellow student. Mrs. Lamblin wrote in her book that she would never have written her memoirs except that Beauvoir had written pettily and vengefully about her and, “nauseated and disgusted when I discovered the true personality of the woman I had loved all my life,” she published the work, entitled Mémoires d’Une Jeune Fille Dérangée, a play on Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’Une Jeune Fille Rangée. Lamblin holds that Beauvoir had introduced her and others to Sartre in order to satisfy his “need for romantic conquests,” particularly after his own interest in Beauvoir had cooled. Although Lamblin faced danger as a Jew, Sartre and Beauvoir “never worried about my fate or tried to get news of me” from the end of 1940 until the liberation in 1944.

In Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944–1956, Tony Judt damns Sartre as being a national embarrassment, not an asset, because he failed to test his political thoughts against political realities. Sartre, Judt declares, argued away the brutalities of Stalinism, was deluded or perverse, and thought too much but saw too little. Judt, however, does not attack other intellectuals, such as political commentator Raymond Aron, Catholic novelist François Mauriac, publisher Jean Paulhan, and the humanist Albert Camus.

(See the article by Frederick A. Olafson on Sartre in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.)

(See a 2009 photo of Sartre's gravesite.)

{CB; CE; CL; EU, Hazel E. Barnes; ILP, Additus, 15 December 1961; PA; TYD; TRI}